Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

The NHS can't go on being free if selfish baby boomers consult GPs for the slightest aches and pains

Some baby boomers have unrealistic expectations of what the NHS can provide

The NHS can’t go on like this. Patients today – baby boomers, especially – bother the doctor with minor complaints when their grandparents would have grinned and borne it, and have unrealistic expectations of what the health service can provide. The system is at breaking point. The solution? We are going to have to start paying for some medical services at the point of delivery.

“It probably can limp on for the rest of this decade,” warns Dr Lee, “ but the reality is the pressures coming from the baby boomer generation and their expectations of health care, their perceptions of pain and suffering is profoundly different to their stoic parents who survived the war.”

I suspect most family doctors would recognise his picture of patients today. Many of the people who consult an inner-city GP on a typical day aren’t ill, not in the sense their great-grandparents would recognise. They may be lonely, unhappy or anxious. They may have a cold, or aches and pains. But those are not conditions that the wartime generation would have thought merited taking up the doctor’s time over.

You just got on with things, in those days. You didn’t make a fuss. Now, I accept that the bottle-it-up approach can bring its own complications; who knows how many mysterious physical disorders erupted as a result of suppressed and unexpressed psychological issues? But the fact remains that the prevailing attitude in the past was – consult a doctor only if your arm had dropped off; if it’s not something really serious, stay well away from "the quack". If anything, people thought going to the doctor would make you ill, or uncover something you were better off not knowing about.

There’s another factor that would have deterred patients from bothering the doctor with minor complaints in the pre-NHS age: cost. If you have to pay even a modest amount for a service, it changes your attitude. You value it. If medicine’s given for nothing, then inevitably it will be taken for granted. If this isn’t true, why do so many patients still casually miss GPs’ appointments without cancelling them (costing the NHS £600 million, according to this paper in 2009)?

We should applaud Dr Lee’s courage in stating politically unpalatable truths, and his common sense. (He is refreshingly honest, for instance, about how difficult a job dispensing prescriptions is: “It’s like counting Smarties.”) We need to accept reality rather than hand over even more problems to the next generation: if we want to continue to enjoy the sort of health service where GPs are on hand to fuss sympathetically over every twinge, and dish out expensive medicines in vast quantities as well, it is going to cost us more money. Either that, or we will have to learn to be as tough and lacking in self-pity as the wartime generation, and that’s unlikely to happen.